I'm back in the land of the living, unlike this softie.

Dead lizard.

 I have been sick, and busy. You know how it is. I have been working on some lovely things, but can't share them with you because they are part of Chookyblue's Secret Santa Christmas Swap. (I'm actually really pleased with the gifts I made. Can't wait till Christmas to see how they are received!) I managed to send my parcels off to somewhere overseas today. (Yes, a bit late, but last week was a dreadful week! Couldn't go anywhere or do anything!) So, since I can't share the lovely things I thought I would share a gross thing that Miss 25 made last week. A dead lizard. You know you want one! Of course it is her own pattern. The dead lizard is the first in a series of softies that Miss 25 and Miss 19 are collaborating on. They have been working on a dragon, a cupcake, a snail and a pocket watch today. My sewing room and lounge room (which are connected)  have been filled with making and doing the past few days. It has been lovely as we each have been working on our respective projects. There is fabric everywhere, and beads, and embroidery threads, and three sewing machines set up on three tables. Hmm... perhaps I need to do a little tidy tomorrow morning. And then on to more sewing. (I have so many things I want to make at the moment!)

Exposed guts and ribs.

Monster Tutorial

We needed monsters and so we made a bunch. (Possibly a dungeon of monsters actually) Some of you wondered how we did it, so here is a tutorial explaining how. I must say here that the designing brain behind this was Mrs 25 (Picklesticks). I have her permission to write this tutorial. There is no pattern needed, you just go with the flow!

It's not necessary to have a large Ikea bag full of fabric to create a monster, but it's how we do it!

You will need

• polar fleece for monster front and legs. Two or three colours.

• felt for eye and teeth
  

• teddy bear eye
  

• fur fabric for monster back
  

You start out by looking at the shape of the polar fleece that you have. (This accounts for some of our weirdly shaped monsters) Find a piece that looks like a monster and cut it out.

Some monsters have a mouth that cuts their head in two or you can insert a mouth on one side like I have here. Cut the monster piece for the mouth. This is also when you cut out some teeth or a tongue if you want to put them in.

Choose a narrow stretch stitch on your sewing machine. This is the stitch that you will use for the entire project. If you don't have a relatively narrow stretch stitch choose a narrow zig zag stitch to use for the entire project.

Stitch the mouth to the rest of the head using a narrow seam. If you are putting teeth in sandwich them between the mouth and monster pieces before sewing this seam.

Next is the eye. (You can use as many as you like. We tend to go for the cyclops look cause it stretches the available eyes across more monsters. However, I think a 3 or even 5 eyed monster would look very scary!) You need to use felt on both sides of the eye. This is so that the polar fleece doesn't stretch and the eye fall out.

Sew the top piece of felt on the front of the monster. It is not necessary to have the back piece of felt sewn on. It doesn't even have to be the same size as the front. Just large enough to keep the eye in place. (You can use scrap pieces of felt for this)

Clip the felt and polar fleece so that the teddy eye can be placed in the felt. Clip the back piece of felt too.

Place the eye through the front of the monster and then push the back piece of felt onto the teddy eye and secure the eye.

This is how it looks from the back.

The finished monster front. Next you make the legs and arms if your monster needs limbs.

Mrs 25 always sews the limbs freehand. This freaked me out at first and I did draw my first set of legs and arms with pen on the wrong side of the polar fleece. Do this if you want to. I soon realised that the limbs don't have to be very accurate to be representative of monster's limbs! Put the polar fleece together with the right side on the inside. You must have the stretchy bit of the polar fleece running across the narrow part of the limbs. This is so you can turn the limbs through more easily.

Now is the time to get your Purple Thang out if you have one. I recently won one at the Wallaroo retreat and it works a treat!

Turn your limbs through. If they are narrow this can be a little difficult, but with a Purple Thang I managed to turn through really narrow arms without any trouble at all. (The stretch helps here)

These are my three legs. Not identical at all, but very monster-like!

Pin the limbs to the finished monster front.

Place the finished monster front on the fur and cut out a back. You can just use polar fleece for the back if you want. We did for some. However the fur has much more prescence! (Place the monster front and the fur with right sides together before you cut out the back)

Sew the front and back together leave a small opening so you can turn your monster through and stuff it. The best place for such an opening is either on the bottom or the top.

Make sure you leave the turning opening larger than I did here! It was a struggle to work with such a small opening.

Turn the monster through.

The finshed, flat monster. Now to give it some shape!

Stuff your monster

Thread a needle double and tie a knot at the end.

Then sew the opening up using ladder stitch. Knot the end of the thread when you are finished and cut the thread off.

Finished monster! Hmm..... he probably could do with some teeth. I just completely forgot them! Have fun, and I hope you make plenty of monsters.

We got monsters!!!

Lots of them!!! We spent today making monsters. Me, Mrs 25, Miss 17, Mr 15, Miss 13 and Mr 9. Mrs 25 is a softie expert and had us all sewing like crazy! They are prizes for the sideshows at Miss 17's birthday. We are planning to sew more later in the week. Soooooooo much fun!!!

Time flies

January flew by this year, and February is doing the same thing! Hopefully I will post a photo of the completed give away bag tonight. This is something else I have been working on this week. In fact it is this doll that has set me pondering about how time flies. I started this doll somewhere near the end of 2007. I remember sewing her head on in October of that year, but her head was all wobbly and I gave up. I am not a softie maker, but I was inspired by all of my children (who all make the most wonderful softies!) and some sewing successes I had in August 2007. I decided that I had it in me to design a doll and make her, despite never having done it before. The last couple of weeks I have been sorting through my crafting things (a legacy of changing rooms and me moving to the room without storage - don't worry, my Bradley took me to Ikea to remedy the storage problem.) and setting up my sewing room. You can see a little of my desk in the doll photo. Well, I found the doll with her ridiculous wobbly head and decided to finish her off. Miss 22 watched me as I took her head off and commented that I was halfway to serial killerdom. I guess she took my "finish her off" comment a different way! Now her head isn't wobbly anymore and I even made her some clothes. She isn't an Amish doll (faceless) so she's not quite finished yet, but I'm working on it. I have learnt a lot from making her and may just become a softie maker after all. Check in later for some bag updates!

Look! It's a frog!

One of the best things about this time of year is all the creativity that goes on! Allsorts of gifts are being crafted here. This frog is one Miss 16 made today. He is just so happy! And she designed him herself! (She is so clever. Of course, I am biased, but look at that cute frog and tell me I'm wrong!)

I spent yesterday and today sewing too. They are kind of secret presents, and nothing much is actually finished yet. Maybe there will be some photos later in the week. (Pretty sure there will be! I can't resist showing you my latest!)

A Pokemon softie sewing kind of day

These two love Pokemon and love sewing, so they spent today combining the two! There was some machine sewing and some hand sewing done. They used their Pokemon books for reference as they designed their patterns to produce their very own Pokemon softies.

And these are some of the Pokemon they produced! They worked so hard in fact that we ran out of stuffing! So all pokemon work is on hold until we go to spotlight to get more. (Apparently ya gotta catch em all!)

Oddish

Igglybuff
Dratini

An air of creativity!

There must be an air of creativity wafting through our home at the moment. I LOVE it! It's exciting and inspiring! I can't wait for the week ahead. We are going to make ALL sorts of things.


Miss 10 made a bag. Miss 15 started the creativity today. She spent time making softies and then started a quilt. It's her first "grown up" attempt at a quilt. She has made some quilts before when younger. They were not very successful because she didn't want me to look at them in order to help her. Today, however, she asked for advice and how I would do it. Just mechanically, she made all of her colour choices herself and all her placement choices too.

I have been knitting today. I forgot to take photos of my knitting! Rest assured, there's plenty of time to see it! I am knitting a jumper. I am notoriously slow at knitting anything that requires more than one piece knitted!!! And this jumper requires 4 pieces. I am nearly finished the back.

This is what I have been doing whilst knitting. Yes! Watching "White Christmas". I am an old-movie-aholic and my favourite kind of old movie is the musical. So I was incredibly surprised to find that I hadn't seen this movie before. I watched it today with and without the commentary. I love commentaries! Do you like them? I love all the stuff you find out!

Art at the Hart

This is us at "Art at the Hart" on Saturday December 1st. We discovered the details for this artist's market in the Advertiser some time ago. It is a 2 day market that runs in tandem with "Celtica", a Celtic music festival. We initially enquired whether we could just come for the Saturday because Sunday is our Sabbath and we don't engage in commercial transactions on the Sabbath. The organisers really wanted artists who could be there for the 2 days so we asked them to keep us in mind if they got anyone who wanted to be there just for the Sunday. A few weeks ago we got a call! Mrs 23 (Picklesticks) had her toys (and sold heaps), and Miss 17 had her photography (and sold none), I had some bags and postcards (and sold 1 postcard). Mrs 23 was very happy. Miss 17 and I had fun!


The day started out with quite a few of us there. We brought a tall boy to help us with our setting up, which meant we had to bring a small boy too, because you can't leave 7 year olds at home on their own!!! Miss 10 came too because she had her basketball game at 8:30am. Fortunately her game was at Port Adelaide and you can see the stadium from the Hart's Mill complex, so even Basketball SA was smiling on us that day! As the day wore on we dwindled in numbers because Bradley came to pick up any children who were bored.

This was the view from our stall. I'm refering to the water view here, not the guys!!! Hey! Miss 17 is a photographer, and we gave her the camera. She's 17, there were always going to be photos of guys! Don't you love the fly on the lens!!! There were so many flies in the morning. They thinned out as the day went on (perhaps they got bored too!)

It was an interesting day on the Port River. There were yachts racing and rescue craft and dolphins.

Now that it's Tuesday (ie a long time since Saturday) and the photos look so beautiful here on my blog I remember the day as a lovely day! On Saturday afternoon, however, it was HOT (38 degrees) and sunny and the flies were buggy and the music got louder and louder as the day went on and my head hurt! (In fact it hurt Saturday night and Sunday and Monday too!) All of us decided that we are not outdoor market kind of people. I remember a fervent discussion we had on the way to the car after packing up. We discussed the idea at length and came to the conclusion that we are etsy people. Cause you don't get sunburnt (aka skin damaged) from the light of your computer, and all the people you meet online are so nice, and we decide to open an etsy shop instead of doing another market! We just aren't outdoorsy people!

Of course, that's not to say that we didn't meet truely wonderful people at Art at the Hart, cause we did! It was a wonderful day and next year (Yes! It's on again next year!) I'm definitely going to go. As a customer only. There were so many beautiful handmade items there. It's a brilliant place to go Christmas shopping!

Today's crafting

Several of my daughters are doll makers, or softie makers. While I was young I spent time making doll's clothes, but never dolls. I liked the idea of making dolls and even bought fabric for a pattern I found in magazine, but I never actually made a doll! Well, here she is! My first doll. In all her naked glory. As soon as she's dressed I'm sending her off to Mikes for their softies for Mirabel drive. Today Pip said on Mikes blog "it's not too late!" So I thought I'd better give this girl a face and a dress and send her off!


Wip. I cut out this fabric from spotlight

using this pattern
for Miss 10's "Sunday" dress. And spent time knitting the scarf I'm working on while the kids played at a homeschooling friend's house. I love knitting because it's just so portable! I have carted all kinds of projects around with me over the years. You know, to ballet, basketball (training and games), music lessons, ante-natal visits, craft classes, ice skating, picnics (we homeschoolers go to a lot of picnics!) etc, etc! In the past I have taken any kind of hand work, but these days I like to take knitting. You just need less stuff to do it!

My week

I can't believe that it is Friday! This week has gone by so quickly. Well, I have achieved some things. Mr 13's room is finished and today we will move him in. I'll show you some photos when his furniture is in. I have also been to IKEA twice. Okay. I know it's an obsession. It's up there with fabric and patchwork shops in my life. Anyway, I have a good excuse for the two visits. I went to help two different people. I have also signed up to make a softie for Mirabel and Mike. Notice I said "signed up" and not "made". I don't often make softies, but it seems like a good cause so I thought I would help out.

This photo is another one taken at Melba's (the chocolate factory) on the weekend. Don't you just love trees? I do. I couldn't resist taking a photo of this beautiful fig tree. Fruit trees are one of my favourite types of trees. I also love tree shade. I remember being a small child when I realised that the shade from trees was "better" than other shade. It's cooler and more refreshing than man made shade. Living in a hot place I appreciate the quality of tree shade.
These jam labels are also from Melba's. I took this photo because I remember the jam label's from my breakfast table as a child. Growing up I was an avid reader and I spent a lot of time looking at labels because they had words on them.
This is Mr 7 on a comfy chair at Melba's. The chair was carved out of a piece of wood and he loved it! It fitted him perfectly! Back to the crafting grindstone!